I think you kind of answer your own question. Social media is just a gossip page on steroids. None of their features are worth paying for; at least, not enough people are willing to pay for it. They realized given showing ads and charging customers, showing ads probably generates 10x revenue for them. Plus, what's to stop another person to offer a free reddit clone?

People pay for junk food all the time. Maybe internet companies are being too greedy and they are pricing themselves incorrectly.

Would you pay $2 USD for all of reddit for a year? How many users does reddit have? It'd probably be a lot of money, but not super profitable. Hence they use adds because they won't shift on price.

They've never tried generating revenue from other meaningful features.

A marketplace would have a very real value for users.

And it would create a much better moat.

Ring, ring. Revenue team, call for you from Cambridge Analytica on line one!

The alternative monetization model is usually subscriptions / freemium features. These don't usually work out for social media sites as people are not willing to pay for user generated content, and the main draw is the content itself so freemium features are usually not high-value enough. Thus, the only remaining viable model is ads.

That's one of the things I suggest. Copy Patreon. They've shown that users are willing to pay for "user generated content"

Isn't that basically Medium?

(Can't reply to the other comment)

> Reddit has 10x the traffic because it's free.

Reddit acquired more traffic because it's free, true. But now, they aren't looking to acquire more traffic. They're looking for more revenue.

One way to get that revenue is to allow already existing content creators to charge for a part of the content.

I think that would not only encourage better content but would bring in other users and generate good revenue.

> One way to get that revenue is to allow already existing content creators to charge for a part of the content.

Brave can do that for reddit and other social media sites now [1]

[1] https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030752872-Whi...

Reddit's model is based on unpaid moderators managing most of the site. There's already controversy around a few moderators controlling all the large communities, karma farming and behind the scenes deals. Introducing money into the mix will just result in even more abuse as moderators try to take their own cut. It's a very messy eco-system that money will just make even messier.

And Substack. And Reddit has 10x their traffic.

Reddit has 10x the traffic because it's free.

> moderators

I suggest to compensate creators not moderators.

Reddit moderators do not support self-promotion [1]. They won't moderate posts where OP is being paid and they aren't.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_sp...

If you think moderators won't take advantage of their position to get a cut of that money then you're living in fantasy land. Or just sell their accounts to others who will do that.

Because coming up with features worth paying for is very, very hard. Which ad-free apps do you currently pay for?

Because no one pays?

Users pay for marketplace features for anything from handmade bird houses to used underwear.